Liberal group cancels event with Hong Kong activist following internal 'concerns' and external criticism from pro-China pundits

• The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activist group that pushes for action on climate change, canceled an event on police brutality after some criticized the involvement of a progressive Hong Kong activist.
• "People inside and outside of the movement raised concerns about this call," Stevie O'Hanlon, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, told Business Insider.
• On social media, critics of the event accused the Sunrise Movement of pushing anti-China propaganda, with many confusing the activist with others in Hong Kong who have met with US politicians.
• "The cancellation of the event suggests to Hong Kong activists that, regardless of how hard they work to educate potential allies abroad about the movement, their effort can easily be erased by a distraction generated by white conspiracy theorists," Shui-yin Sharon Yam, a professor at the University of Kentucky, told Business Insider.

A liberal activist group in the United States canceled an event with a progressive Hong Kong activist, following "concerns" raised by its members and social media backlash from pro-China critics over their participation in a call about police brutality and international solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

On Tuesday, the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activist group that pushes for aggressive action on climate change, announced it would be hosting a call with someone well-versed in dealing with aggressive law enforcement.

"Lessons From Hong Kong: Taking Action in the Uprisings for Black Lives," the event was called, featuring testimony from progressive Hong Kong activist Johnson Yeung on "tactics for taking action."

By Wednesday, the event was canceled, and the post advertising it deleted, following a firestorm of criticism from self-styled communists on Twitter.

"People inside and outside of the movement raised concerns about this call," Stevie O'Hanlon, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, told Business Insider. "This is a complex issue and we're just days away from what could be the largest mobilization for racial justice ever, so we canceled the call to allow our movement to stay 100% focused on showing up this weekend for Black lives."

O'Hanlon said the event could ultimately be rescheduled. But the group would not identify the concerns that led to its cancellation in the first place.

The ostensible concerns, as stated by critics on Twitter, were not subtle: the Sunrise Movement was promoting a US policy of "regime change," and activists in Hong Kong were portrayed as a politically monolithic pawn of Washington in their efforts to preserve the Chinese territory's last vestiges of self-government.

While many Americans, including US lawmakers, oppose China's efforts to consolidate control over Hong Kong, its most visibly capitalist asset, a tiny but vocal on social media fringe of the US left has adopted the sloganeering of Beijing, casting Hong Kong's protests as little more than the destabilizing antics of US-backed reactionaries, even as US-made tear gas is deployed against those in the streets in Hong Kong just as in Minneapolis.

China, which earlier this month was caught operating a major influence operation on Twitter, is an active participant.

When Sunrise Movement announced its event, a writer for China Daily, an English-language periodical owned by the Communist Party, eagerly jumped into the pile on, arguing that Hong Kong protesters "have shut down a BLM event" and "proudly accept and encourage support form the same politicians now egging on US police."

Many appeared to confuse the activist in question with others from Hong Kong who have met with US politicians. "Regime change operative cockroaches," said one user, responding to a tweet from the Sunrise Movement by sharing a photo of two activists from Hong Kong, neither of whom were Johnson Yeung.

Some right-wing US politicians have indeed lent support to the protests in Hong Kong, and met with some activists from the city of 7.5 million, despite defending police tactics at home. Such is international politics, where hypocrisy — condemning state repression in Hong Kong or the US, but not both — is the norm.

China, home to the largest share of the globe's wealthiest people, also faces a good deal of criticism from the left, at home, and elsewhere, over its efforts to pair authoritarianism with free markets in the international financial hub of Hong Kong.

But despite the concerns expressed by some of Sunrise Movement's members and critics, many see a connection between police brutality at home and abroad.

Shui-yin Sharon Yam, a professor at the University of Kentucky, has written about the street battles in Hong Kong and Minneapolis as like-minded struggles against capitalist authoritarianism, arguing that those involved in Black Lives Matter can learn from progressives abroad.

"While these two social movements stem from distinct cultural and historical contexts and unique circumstances of oppression," she previously wrote, "they coalesce through their shared resistance against police brutality and unchecked authority to yield force as sanctioned by the state."

Yam told Business Insider she's dismayed at the cancellation of the Sunrise Movement event, arguing that it points to the strength of "disinformation and smearing campaigns" led by blogs such as the Grayzone, a website that traffics in state-sponsored character assassination and is oft-cited by critics of social movements outside the US.

"The cancellation of the event suggests to Hong Kong activists that, regardless of how hard they work to educate potential allies abroad about the movement, their effort can easily be erased by a distraction generated by white conspiracy theorists," Yam said. Despite the differences, "both movements are combatting state violence and advocate for true inclusion and democracy," she added, and the canceled event "is a great example of how activists from two movements can share tactics and insights with each other."

That's a sentiment shared by writers for Lausan, an activist collective that aims to build "transnational left solidarity" by holding "multiple imperialisms to account."

"The need to center Black lives is important," one writer, Promise Li, told Business Insider.

"But Sunrise needs to understand that by explicitly canceling the event in response to far-right tankie trolls, they are actively legitimizing their demands," he said.

"Tankie" is a term that used to refer to left-wing advocates of Soviet militarism; today it typically refers to active social media users who defend the actions of any state that is nominally opposed to Washington. Li fears it's a tendency that, if catered to, will only damn future attempts at cross-border solidarity.

Solidarity, also, is a two-way street. Writing for Lausan, Li has encouraged activists in Hong Kong not to make the same mistakes as so-called "tankies" in the US.

"Hongkongers must stand with Black Lives Matter: not just because our struggles appear similar," he argued, "but because our liberation as working people in this system of global capitalism is impossible without the liberation of Black people."

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